If you read blogs about bikes you likely saw how Seattle’s DOT installed a dozen and a half bike racks in a place nobody would lock a single bike, let alone dozens of bikes. SDOT did this, quite obviously, to block homeless people from camping in the location, as everyone figured out pretty quickly.

Condemnation from the bike community was swift, but it was circumstantial at best.

The urban bike community of the western world has struggled with its image as male, white, and affluent. Such is often not the case, but nothing reinforces this stereotype like some salaried tech industry bike bro complaining about the homeless camps he had to look at on his commute to work.

The prospect of car-free cities, or at the very least car-free streets in dense downtowns has been a goal of livable street advocates for decades. Their reasons revolve around safety and social connectivity, citing the envelope of harm and loss of humanity created in places overrun with automobile traffic. Rarely do such advocates talk about getting rid of cars for their most dangerous side effect: carbon emissions.

Climate justice advocates are heavily focused on the fossil fuel industry, occasionally pointing out the role of animal agriculture in creating climate change, but almost never criticize the automobile industry itself, or personal fossil fuel use by those driving cars.

That needs to change. We cannot expect to hobble the fossil fuel industry while continuing to provide them with an endless demand for their product.

It’s that time of year again, when world leaders and masses of activists convene to grapple with a dying Earth. Largely indifferent to the effects of climate change, overpopulation, and ecological collapse, this year we’ve seen a slight intensifying of rhetoric from Barack Obama and Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel. Even notorious climate denier Vladimir Putin made a few sympathetic retorts.

Credit the Pope for laying down the hammer this fall on his US trip when he called inaction on climate change “suicide”, and in his 190 page encyclical published this spring. The document is a rousing moral wake up call about the dangers of capitalism, the ways we build cities to divide each another by class, and of how we’ve devastated vast swaths of our natural world.

While 2015 has seen some significant victories like Shell’s failed arctic drilling ambitions and TransCanada’s failed KXL tar sands pipeline, it seems still there are few willing to challenge capital’s roll in creating the climate crisis or to alter their own consumption habits.